DexterThe show is about a vigilante whose murderous vigilantism springs from his own psychosis. The conceit of the show is having us watch the lead character grapple with his psychotic behavior while trying to give the impression of being a normal guy. It's a cute, somewhat tongue in cheek, premise that mostly avoids becoming too formulaic.

The fifth season stands out as being something much more complex and intriguing. The whole story arc grapples with questions of how the mind processes trauma. How the traumatized mind and body desperately try to come up with strategies to avoid a complete breakdown in the presence of overwhelming pain. And the question of whether revenge is sufficient therapy for overcoming PTSD. (The producers of the show seem to think so, but I don't believe it is)

After breaking open this pandora's box of compelling questions, the producers drop the ball, and the sixth season falls back into formula.

Oh just you wait… hehehe!

Jason Moon wrote:
About a month ago we found out that my mom has stage 3 lung cancer and the last month has been hell. She is all I have. She is getting ready to do radiation and chemo therapy on August 1st. Her and I have been watching all the seasons of “LOST” on netflix and she really likes the show and it has helped us pass the time. I really enjoyed the first 3 seasons the most and we are finishing up season 5 right now.

Wow, that';s very hard to get through :(
I hope watching Lost together is a good bonding experience.

So good binge shows like that are Park and Rec, Castle, White collar, Burn Notice, 30 Rock, Bones and others.

Trap is yet another proof that Shyamalan operates with some of the most brilliant ideas and premises in the film industry, only to let them sink into ridiculous mediocrity ending up both saying nothing and failing to be consistently entertaining. It's still highly watchable, especially since it's a bow to Hitchcock and considering the premise somewhat parallels his own dedication to his daughter (after all, he wrote her a role of a superstar and built a plot around her concert) but as soon as the location changes the luck-fueled, clever-ish tricks that kept us on the edge of our seats become cheap disappear-reappear ones, it's inconsistent and overall disappointing. I'd give it 7, because it starts out as a 9 and gravitates towards 5 towards the ending.

InkyMoondrop wrote:
Trap is yet another proof that Shyamalan operates with some of the most brilliant ideas and premises in the film industry, only to let them sink into ridiculous mediocrity ending up both saying nothing and failing to be consistently entertaining. It's still highly watchable, especially since it's a bow to Hitchcock and considering the premise somewhat parallels his own dedication to his daughter (after all, he wrote her a role of a superstar and built a plot around her concert) but as soon as the location changes the luck-fueled, clever-ish tricks that kept us on the edge of our seats become cheap disappear-reappear ones, it's inconsistent and overall disappointing. I'd give it 7, because it starts out as a 9 and gravitates towards 5 towards the ending.

Fair critique, but I enjoyed Trap. They gave away the twist too soon in the narrative. It felt like they left out the first act on purpose. I really liked how they filmed the concert off in the distance and Harnett's phony persona. Saleka did a good job.

It had a better payoff than Longlegs, which had a ton of ideas that were just abandoned without explanation. It gives away the ending in the first scene, so that sucks.

Watched a Sydney Sweeney movie called The Voyeurs. An update of Rear Window that has enough originality to make it entertaining. The ending went somewhere I didn't expect. An entertaining thriller.

I'm sill slowly going through NCIS

It's a weird show… One moment they're simple police who investigate crimes that happen to involve naval personal and at other times they're a major intelligence agency full of spies involved in super sensitive operations of national security and terrorism XD
What ARE they supposed to be?



The other strange thing is when they talk about how long they've been doing something, as if that makes them grizzled veterans… I mean, was the show written by 20 year olds?

People saying “oh I've been doing this for 5 years, I KNOW what I'm doing!” or “I've known that guy for ages, like 2 years!” LOL!!!!!
Or people saying “That was ancient history, I don't even remember, I served 15 years ago…”

The time-scales are so short. Those people are fruit flies!

I saw the premiere of a documentary called “Daughters”. It will be airing on Netflix starting august 14th. The overarching subject matter is young black girls dealing with their relationships with their fathers, who are incarcerated. It focuses specifically on a program called “date with daddy,” which brings the daughters into prison to visit with their fathers for a few hours. Even though it is partly a subtle critique of the US prison system, it is first and foremost a film about the human need for contact, and the devastating consequences of removing that contact.

FC, that sounds incredibly powerful!


Many years after the fact, I finally watched How To Train Your Dragon. It was really good. A classic hero n’ friends structure, and wow, the visuals were just gorgeous. I understand there are multiple sequels and even a tv show.

I've been watching “EVIL” on netflix and it is amazing! At first the group of main characters form together and beginning solving cases involving some really nasty mysteries. It's a psychiatrist, a soon to be priest, and a handyman. The lines between human evil and religious supernatural begin to blend more and more as you reach the end of season 1. They have the actor who plays Ben in “LOST” as a satanist and man he does a good job in his acting! The show just keeps getting better and better. I'm impressed with the writing of the show.

I watched Cinema Paradiso on TV a pair of days ago, a very famous movie from 1988.
The movie is good but very slow, but apart from the slowness it aged well. In facts, I can't say if it is slow because it is old or as a director's stylistical choice.

But I wonder how much of that movie is linked to a generational thing: It is largely about the childood of this boy in the immediate postwar sicily. This boy would be a few years older than my parents, so to some degree the world depicted there is the one my parents recounted from their childood (though they were not from Sicily, my mother was from a rural-ish area).
I'm now 48, so people who are 20 today will probably hear different stories. Will this movie still be interesting?

I've been watching season 1 of “From” and it is really spooky. People are stuck in a small old run down town surrounded by a thick huge forest. If they try to drive the roads out of the town it just takes them in a loop back to the same place. Random people who take road trips from all over the states are mysteriously ending up in the run down town. When night falls in the town monsters who look like humans come out of the forest and prey on the towns people. The monsters look like ordinary working people (a bride,milkman,cute girl). They always walk and smile when they come after you and they appear human until they catch you. Their victims are killed slowly as they rip and shred you apart and they enjoy torturing their victims. One man who is ex military steps up as a leader and tries to keep everyone in the town alive and during the daytime he explores the forest and finds livestock and things the townspeople can use. One day he finds a cave full of these rock talismans embedded in the cave walls. He discovers that if you hang these talismans on the inside wall of a house the monsters can't enter the home unless you let them in. It's a mysterious show that keeps evolving and reels you in.

Jason Moon - “From” sounds really cool. I see it's on Paramount Plus here in Canada. I'm gonna check it out.

marcorossi wrote:
I watched Cinema Paradiso on TV a pair of days ago, a very famous movie from 1988. The movie is good but very slow, but apart from the slowness it aged well. In fact, I can't say if it is slow because it is old or as a director's stylistic choice.

Cinema Paradiso was my go-to date movie. After we watched the movie she would see how deep and artistic I was and couldn't say no right? Wrong. Media is very on the nose these days, viewers can't think for themselves anymore. I have pretty much stopped watching new shows because of this.

I watched the 2021 series “Maid” with Margaret Qualley. This is about a woman with a very young daughter navigating the system to help domestic abuse victims. One thing I really appreciated was that it was the unseen emotional abuse they focused on and the characters were well developed. The abusive husband is a jerk, but he does attempt to get sober and fights for custody. Her mother, Andie McDowell (Qualley's real mother) is a bipolar bohemian artist, but she was also the one who rescued Qualley from their own abusive situation. It is well written, but it was about 2 episodes too long.

Also watched the Natasha Lyonne series “Poker Face” from a few years ago. This is a reverse mystery series where they give away the killer right away and the detective has to figure out how to prove it. Lyonne is always a lot of fun to watch and there are many surprising guest stars like Adrian Brody.

marcorossi wrote:
I watched Cinema Paradiso on TV a pair of days ago, a very famous movie from 1988.

That is a really lovely movie. I remember when it came out, all the critics raved about it so much that it turned me off LOL!
I didn't watch it till the 2000s when I was going through a bit of a classic movie thing for a while. It deserves its reputation.

Even without a connection to the place or the stories it still got me.

———

I saw the recent film "Jackpot" on Amazon Prime.
It's about a lottery in LA where people become billionaires from winning but the catch is that people are legally allowed to kill the winner till a certain time of the day and whoever manages to kill that winner becomes the new winner.
No one else is allowed to be killed though except maybe the winner killing people who try to kill them.
It stars Awkwafina and John Cena.

It's not bad. Reasonably funny action comedy. Violence and death and not things I like in film but this is pretty cartoonish.

Yeah she was pretty good in that, the premise was clever too, I never watched it to the end in case something bad happened to her character.

sleeping_gorilla wrote:
Also watched the Natasha Lyonne series “Poker Face” from a few years ago. This is a reverse mystery series where they give away the killer right away and the detective has to figure out how to prove it. Lyonne is always a lot of fun to watch and there are many surprising guest stars like Adrian Brody.

I watched Five Blind Dates on Amazon Prime.

The plot of this is that a young woman is going to be the maid of honour at her sister's wedding. A lady reads her fortune as part of the re-wedding stuff and says she'll find her own soul-mate after 5 blind dates.

This is super dooper clearly inspired by Crazy Rich Asians, which is why I watched it- because I love that movie.

It's about an Australian Chinese family in Queensland and down in Sydney.

The good:
It's nice and bright and colourful. The whole thing is light and breezy. High quality filming. Good acting and performances. It has some nice humour and doesn't take itself too seriously.

The not so good:
It's not that funny and it's a bit subdued generally- that's a more cultural Australian stylistic thing, but because they have Crazy Rich Asians as an influence that doesn't work so well because the American humour and style in that is more over the top and obvious.
I feel characters are a bit young for marriage to be as serious as it is to them.
They include the “Gay best friend” trope, which was old and tired 15 years ago. You CAN still have that character but you NEEEEEEED to move beyond the cliche.

All in all this was not a bad movie. It's a shallow but fun little romance and a good little superficial glimpse into the Australian Chinese community.

Unreal on Netflix. The series is about the film crew that works behind the scenes of a fictitious reality TV show. The producers of the show spend all their time cynically manipulating the hapless contestants into doing one horrible thing after another. The series hilariously showcases the depraved crassness and vulgarity of L. A. show biz culture.

fallopiancrusader wrote:
Unreal on Netflix. The series is about the film crew that works behind the scenes of a fictitious reality TV show.

That sounds very good! ^_^

On the weekend I was feeling down so I needed something FUN and nice to watch.
So I tried my hand at anime on Crunchieroll again.

I saw the Spy X Family movie first.
It was just plain fun ^_^ So nice to revisit that crazy little family again. The story was about the trying to sample an unusual desert at a remote town in the hills so they could replicate it for the little girl's cooking exam and impress her teacher, but all sorts of epic spy stuff stuff got in the way including a giant airship, a cyborg gunman, a terrible struggle not to poop, and threats to peace between nations.

Next up I started a new series, My Next Life as a Villainess: All Routes Lead to Doom!
This is yet another “another world” story, this time while on a date a young princess falls over and hits her head. She wakes up in her bed later with the knowledge that she used to be a girl from Japan who played a game set in the very world she wakes up in.
The twist though is that the person she is now is the main antagonist in a dating romance game. So she now knows she is fated to die at age 17 when the protagonist outwits her and everything will go wrong in her life…
So she resolves to do everything she can to avoid that fate using all the stuff she learned from plying the game.

It's a really lovely, gentle story because the character used to be a brat and a bully so she HAS to be nice and help people instead - so she turns into a wonderful person who everyone starts to love and adore. All the characters she interacts with basically get drawn along with her as her harem and she's totally oblivious to it.

It was just what the doctor ordered.

—————–

I also finally restated watching Farscape again, after years and years.
The CGI does not hold up that well but its better than a lot of stuff that was around at the time. The props, costumes, sets, effects, acting, and story is certainly many thousands of miles ahead of the Battle Star Galactica reboot and Firefly.
The first episode wasn't the best for that show though. The second was much MUCH better. I'll be watching more of it.

I watched Cuckoo. I really liked it. For a good while it's just an absurd thriller, some mystery-monster scare-ride in an idyllic setting. It's good at keeping up tension, but not a movie that'd give you nightmares. Hunter Schafer works well in the lead. Then comes the scientific part that's quite an interesting take for a horror. And then the third part, which is chaotic compared to the rest. That's where the real magic happens. It never stops being about scares, violence and being your usual horror/thriller, it never really ceases to be absurd and weird. But that's when the character truly shines, when it finally gets to be more than just a struggle to stay alive. That was a neat ending.

Horror always gets me down 😅

I saw While we're young, starting Ben Stiller, Toni Collette, Adam Driver, harles Gordon and others.

It's about an older Gen X documentary maker (Stiller), befriending a millennial film maker (Driver), and having a bit of a midlife crisis LOL!

It makes a bit of a comment about how things are changing and how millennials do things differently because Stiller's character has trouble dealing with the the way Driver's character does things…

We learn that Driver's character is manipulative and an arsehole- a fake friend who steals ideas and goes behind people backs. But the film massively miss-steps by saying that's just because he's a millenial and they're used to remixing things.
It's bullshit. His character is an evil POS and NOT representative of the generation in any way.

I just started watching Dexter, and I hooked! I didn't really expect to be so invested but I did always like mysteries and detective stuff (@^@)

I watched Matt Walsh's Mockumentary “Am I Racist?” I can't stand him so it was rough having to watch him on screen for 90 minutes. It was supposed to be a mix of skits and real interviews like Borat, but the whole thing seemed staged to me.

There is an actress Melanie Stone who is known for starring in the budget fantasy “Mythica” with Kevin Sorbo as Gandalf. She has not made a ton of movies but overall they are solid watches. She has a lot of range and shows that she can pull off believable action roles such as in Scarlett, thrillers like The Killing Pact and Shattered Memories, and comedies like He's Dead and So Am I, and Love Switch.

Alien Romulus - Entertaining, but only works because of the nostalgia, since the Alien franchise has been famous for daring to try new approaches with just about all of its installments and this one simply borrows what worked and what looked cool and throws it all into one film. Best aspects are the visuals and the setting that takes you back to the first movie. Worst part is the lack of originality and possibly the way it uses a now dead actor's likeness to sort-of bring back a character through AI. Ironically it's similar to how the evil Corporation cloned Ripley in the 4th film for reaching their goals in war and profits. It might be a nice way to keep someone's memory alive, yet it's also a way to make sure actors can be nameless, faceless and underpaid while someone else's face and voice is copied on them. And ffs, we get it, we've got it in the first film, that the Coropration is evil and doesn't care about human lives, at this point using a bunch of young, extorted orphans to hammer that in is just sad.

Also, it's just as much a horror as the previous ones were, yet it was rated: “16+” in my country, so technically they find it more suitable for minors than a same-sex couple holding hands.

Speak no Evil - For most part it's a good, tragicomical and tense film about how politeness can doom you, trying to shrug alarming things off as cultural differences, like in Midsommar. Too bad that everything that works in it is borrowed and copied almost word-by-word from the original it remakes and that the ending is changed to give Americans some catharsis. The original was a hauntingly bleak and terrifying vision with some deeply controversial anti-liberal and mildly xenophobic takeaway. One that can be criticized and challenged, but a statement none the less. I could imagine a better ending for both. But this ultimately threw out its conclusion to please audiences who want to be entertained, so it ends up saying very little with no real punch to pack.

Watched the anime "Lonely Castle in the Mirror“ on netflix (the italian title though is different and translates as ”the invisible castle“, the original title is ”Kagami no Kojō“). A middle school girl who can't go to middle school anymore because of a trauma (revealed in the plot) can go through a magic mirror from her room to a mysterious magic castle, together with other 6 middle schoolers (who met there). The castle can grant one wish, but if they flunk the rules they'll be devoured by the Big Bad Wolf, fairytale version. I liked the movie because it has an eerie athmosphere. The movie is from 2022, which makes me think that I could also note here movies that I watched some time ago that I think are cool.

Aand starting with movies that I watched some time ago, ”The eight mountains“, an italo/french coproduction with a belgian director (live action). It is a drama movie about two long term friends who lead different but parallel lives. I think that both characters represent different sides of the same person, and it reminds a lot of the novel ”Narcissus and Goldmund" by Herman Hesse that I read when I was an highschooler. Specifically, since also the Hesse novel was Jung-inspired, the movie is about introversion/extraversion: if it is better to live closed in your own world but being honest to yourself (introversion) or to accept the world and adapt to it (extraversion). I liked it a lot, the photography is awesome and the characters are relatable, the actors are really good (but I got to see it in original language). It is a slow movie though, not what you want to watch if you are in the mood for action.

marcorossi wrote:

It is a drama movie about two long term friends who lead different but parallel lives. I think that both characters represent different sides of the same person, and it reminds a lot of the novel “Narcissus and Goldmund” by Herman Hesse that I read when I was an highschooler. Specifically, since also the Hesse novel was Jung-inspired, the movie is about introversion/extraversion: if it is better to live closed in your own world but being honest to yourself (introversion) or to accept the world and adapt to it (extraversion).

I read Hesse’s Narcissus and Goldmund in May followed immediately by Siddhartha. It was 80% Goldmund and 20% Narcissus. A perfect salacious novel in times of plague. My favorite scene was when Goldmund enters the plague village and sees a woman brushing her hair through a window and asks her to join him if she wants to survive. Freud would have a lot to say about Goldmund’s relationship with his dancer mother and his obsession in modeling his art after her.

Currently watching The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (1979) animated film. The Turkish Delight scene with Edmund is laughter inducing. I accepted the idea of a magic wardrobe when I was much younger, but after reading the first half of C.S. Lewis’ other Narnia book, The Magician’s Nephew, I am convinced the wardrobe is a portal or Lucy, Edmund, Susan, and Peter experienced a time slip whenever they traveled to the other world.

Alien Romulus - Entertaining, but only works because of the nostalgia, since the Alien franchise has been famous for daring to try new approaches with just about all of its installments and this one simply borrows what worked and what looked cool and throws it all into one film. Best aspects are the visuals and the setting that takes you back to the first movie. Worst part is the lack of originality and possibly the way it uses a now dead actor's likeness to sort-of bring back a character through AI. Ironically it's similar to how the evil Corporation cloned Ripley in the 4th film for reaching their goals in war and profits. It might be a nice way to keep someone's memory alive, yet it's also a way to make sure actors can be nameless, faceless and underpaid while someone else's face and voice is copied on them. And ffs, we get it, we've got it in the first film, that the Coropration is evil and doesn't care about human lives, at this point using a bunch of young, extorted orphans to hammer that in is just sad.

Also, it's just as much a horror as the previous ones were, yet it was rated: “16+” in my country, so technically they find it more suitable for minors than a same-sex couple holding hands.

I really liked Romulus, but yeah, it's very much Alien the greatest hits. I think it works for the most part. I've zero issue with the stuff about the corporation, it's established and was used to provide character motivations. The use of an old character was mixed. The weakest special effects in the movie, but narratively it sort of makes sense. Apparently the actors family were happy with the usage as it's what he wanted but maybe that's just Disney trying to smooth things over. It's been suggested that it was a late in production change made as a female actor was originally going to play a company synth. That would explain the weak special effects.

The rating thing makes me laugh, not just the homophobic laws, but the general attitude that it's more okay for young people to see violence, destruction and death than it is anything sexual or to hear “bad” words. But that's a whole different conversation.

You should see the movie version of Siddhartha. It was made in the trippy, dippy 1970s. A well known Bollywood actress caused a lot of controversy doing the nude scenes. Saw it in my East Asian history class in college. One of my classmates would go on to become a rapper in the 1990s Sister Soljah. She was pretty outspoken in class.

There were any number of big budget trippy movies that came out of Hollywood in the 1970s. A lot of them tanked at the box office.

Watched a few episodes of From. It would have been better as a movie. Some good actors, but it is badly paced and filled with scenes that are not important. Do they brutally punish a man for tragically losing his family? They have spent years trying to survive the monsters just to feed one of their people to them.

Barbaric and unnecessary. It's drama for the sake of drama. We have to do something edgy and shocking because we don't have enough story to tell.

I like the idea, but this suffers from many problems that have turned me away from modern TV. I am surprised it has made it past the first season.

Megalopolis - It's real difficult to write about such a film, because it's not the usual experience you'd get in the movie theater and it's an odd one: both a Hollywood banger and an arthouse film, or maybe neither. The directing and the visuals create a flow that carries you through the scenes without making certain things obvious or explaining how the fantasy-like element of stopping time works in it. Naturally, it's filled with references to the Roman Empire, but on a deeper level it takes inspiration from all kinds of sources: it's heavily inspired by Fritz Lang's Metropolis from 97 years ago, it's protagonist is clearly the type of character Ayn Rand dreamt up for The Fountainhead and sometimes the movie feels like a mixture of the two. But Megalopolis seems to be the single greatest monument for the past 100 years of cinema culture, something that's worth a rewatch or two. It asks the question whether cinema has a future or not and all in all… is a radically optimistic vision on the matter.

bravo1102 wrote:

There were any number of big budget trippy movies that came out of Hollywood in the 1970s. A lot of them tanked at the box office.

Well, it didn't come out of Hollywood, but I saw Suspiria recently, which certainly qualifies as trippy. I am referring to the 1977 version directed by Dario Argento, of course. It was so cheesy as to almost read as a farce, but a good campy watch nonetheless. I felt like the crazy sets were the real stars of the movie.